Founding Software Engineer

About Gradient Robotics

Gradient Robotics is building intelligent robots for data centers and factories. We believe the fastest practical path to capable general-purpose robotics is through industry deployment.

We own and build our full robotics stack — designing the hardware, building the software systems, training ML models, and manufacturing through a global supply chain — for world-class iteration speed, reliability, and scale.

We've built 3 generations of robots with a team of 7, backed by top-tier investors and working toward pilots with the world's largest data center builders. Our team created and built the best-selling open-source humanoid robots in the US at K-Scale Labs and worked on generations of foundation software for Tesla Optimus.

As a founding software engineer at Gradient, you'll work close to the hardware — from kernel and firmware up to the autonomy stack. You'll own data pipelines that move hundreds of megabytes at single-digit millisecond latency. Your systems will bring visibility and determinism into real-time, end-to-end inference pipelines with one goal: the ML model is the only stochastic component.

• Ship performance-critical code to real robots daily

• Understand the full data flow from AI models all the way to actuators

• Push down latency and tighten the stack to make the system faster, more deterministic, and more reliable

• Software: Rust, Python, C++, operating systems, multithreading

• Infrastructure: Bazel, Nix, HIL testing, CI/CD

• Firmware / Platform: Linux kernel hacking, embedded systems

• Tracing / Profiling: ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF

• Linux I/O: DPDK, SPDK, io_uring

• Shipped production systems close to hardware (drivers, kernels, embedded, robotics, or similar)

• Debugged timing and concurrency issues in the wild

• Owned messy, ambiguous problems and turned them into robust software

At Gradient, you’ll ship performance-critical code to real robots daily, understand the full data flow from AI models all the way to actuators, and watch the system get faster, more deterministic, and more reliable as you push down latency and tighten the stack. If that excites you, we should talk.